Information School News

A workshop on Accessing Cultural Heritage at Scale is being organised by Professor Paul Clough and Paula Goodale of the Information School, along with colleagues Maristella Agosti (University of Padua, Italy) and Seamus Lawless (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland). Focusing on information access issues in large-scale digital libraries and online collections in the cultural heritage domain, the workshop aims to bring together academics and practitioners from the fields of digital libraries, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and other related areas. The workshop aims to investigate current work, state-of-the-art solutions and future research needs that enhance discovery, exploration and serendipity within these valuable digital resources. A call for papers is available via the workshop web site http://achs.group.shef.ac.uk/ , inviting full papers, short papers and posters, and the deadline for submissions is 18th April

Congratulations to Dr Briony Birdi who has been announced as the runner up of the 2016 iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award. The iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award recognises outstanding work in the information field. The nominations are solicited from all members of the iSchools organisation and are judged by a selection committee drawn from leading international schools.     Dr. Birdi’s thesis: ‘We are here because you were there: an investigation of the reading of, and engagement with, minority ethnic fiction in UK public libraries,’ addresses a current social and political issue involving minority ethnic fiction using three empirical studies to survey reading habits,” said Dr. Seadle, Award Co-Chair. “The reviewers also agreed that this dissertation was a serious competitor for the prize and clearly deserved to be the runner up.”      More information about the 2016 Doctoral Dissertation Award honorees, including research abstracts, can be found here.

Students and staff at the Information School shared an international celebration of new year, in an event organised under the aegis of the Information School Society . Dr Andrew Cox introduced the event and Syke Xin Zhao and Cindy Fu explained Chinese New Year customs. Piyapat Jarusawat described Songkran in Thailand. As well as enjoying traditional Chinese nibbles, attendees could participate in a number of activities run by experts from The Confucius Institute : - Tea ceremony, Miss Yi Yang - Chinese traditional costume, Miss Tingting Cai - GuZheng music performance, Dr. Shu Jiang - Paper cutting, Ms. Li Li   Shu Jiang  (Confucius Institute) shows Akmaral Imangaliyeva how to play GuZheng .     Piyapat Jarusawat tries on traditional Chinese costume. Skina Ehdeed tries traditional Chinese costume and the GuZheng   Confucius Institute Staff Ms. Li Li and Tingting Cai demonstrate paper cutting.

A recent blog post has been published on the LSE International Development blog written by Dr Christopher Foster (The Information School) and Dr Shamel Azmeh (LSE). The post entitled 'New Trade Conflicts and the Race for Technological Leadership in the Digital Economy' considers how laws, technologies and trading rules shape the Internet. It discusses the emergence 'digital industrial policy' in middle income countries and consequently how new trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) are attempting to reshape digital information flows and digital data. The full post can be viewed on the LSE blog here . This post accompanies the release of an LSE working paper "The TPP and the digital trade agenda: Digital industrial policy and Silicon Valley’s influence on new trade agreements”, by Shamel Azmeh & Christopher Foster which can be found here .

The Information School has a vacancy for a fixed-term Research Associate, starting on 1st April (or as soon as possible thereafter) for a period of 22 months. The successful candidate will work as part of a small team of Sheffied researchers on the European Commission Horizon 2020 funded project ‘IMPROVER: Improved risk evaluation and implementation of resilience concepts to critical infrastructure’. The aim of the study is to explore howinformation shared via social media can help reduce response and recovery times and raise awareness about the risk offuture disasters. The Sheffield team will look specifically at how community representatives and those involved in emergency management can use social media to create early-warning systems that can be activated during such events . The closing date for applications is 10 March 2016 and further information can be found here.

The Research Ethics Group of the Academy of Social Sciences and the New Social Media New Social Science (NSMNSS) network are hosting a one day conference that aims to further develop and explore the ethics of social science research using social media. The purpose of the conference is to move the debate forward and provide examples of good practice. PhD student Wasim Ahmed will present a paper at the con fe rence, co-authored with Dr Gianluca Demartini and Prof Peter Bath in the Ethical Practicalities Parallel Session A on Using Twitter as a data source: An overview of ethical challenges. Conference Registration on eventbrite can be found here . Twitter hashtag for the conference is: #SoMeEthics . The full programme can be found here or here [pdf] and the abstract booklet is here [pdf] . The Twitter hashtag for the conference is: #SoMeEthics

On Thursday 11 February the Information School Society presents: New Year Celebration This year, to celebrate New Year traditions the Information School Society has chosen a Chinese theme. It’s the year of the Monkey, but the event is international.  There will be talks about the New Year in the UK, China and Thailand This free event includes seasonal snacks and drinks to share and the Confucius Institute will be running some interesting activities, including live music and paper cutting.   The event will be held in the iSpace in the Information School at 4:30-5:30pm and you can book your place on Eventbrite here

100 scholarships worth £10,000 are available for students starting a taught postgraduate course this year. The scholarships are for students who meet at least one of a selection of widening participation criteria (targeting groups under-represented at taught postgraduate level) and/or students who achieve a first in their undergraduate degree.     Further information about the scholarships, including eligibility information and an outline of the application/selection process, can be found here . The deadline for applications is the 22 May 2016.

On Wednesday 17th February Dr Elaine Toms of the Information School who will be discussing  Adapting Technology for Effective Knowledge Work: Where does/should the Human Stop and the Machine Start Dr Tom's research focuses on understanding why information systems fail users and designing systems for optimum human use. This involves understanding how people work and use information and how people use existing systems to accomplish their work, it also includes evaluating novel tools that facilitate access to and use of information. As a result her research lies at the intersection of human computer interaction, information retrieval and the representation and presentation of information. Elaine’s current research includes improving search systems to support real-life work tasks (rather than bags of words), new approaches to evaluating search systems, understanding serendipity and how systems can deliver on serendipity and the relationship between human curiosity

On 4 February 2016 at 4pm, the Sheffield Methods Institute team are running a live Q&A on reddit around the use of data in the media  - and anything else. It will be posted on https://www.reddit.com/r/ dataisbeautiful from 3:30pm for participants to post questions in advance.

Dr Paul Reilly and Dr Jo Bates were interviewed by University of Sheffield student Jonathan S Pickles for The National Student. The article 'The far right and false imagery' article examines on how far-right groups have doctored images of celebrities to spread fear about refugees in Europe. The full article can be read here

On 29 January 206 the Council of the European University Association (EUA) approved the “ Roadmap on Open Access to Research Publications ”. The Roadmap aims to assist universities in the transition to Open Access (OA) and is the first in a series of initiatives that EUA plans to develop to address the implications of Open Science for European universities. The Roadmap has been drafted in close collaboration with EUA’s Expert Group on Science 2.0/Open Science , a group of 20 experts from 19 countries designated by their respective national rectors’ conferences (NRCs), including the Information School's Professor Stephen Pinfield . The Roadmap on Open Access to Research Publications focuses primarily on the following areas: •    Fostering structured dialogue among all stakeholders; •    Promoting and supporting the adoption of OA policies, infrastructures and initiatives by European universities; •    Encouraging the development and establishment of advanced scientific

Wasim Ahmed , a second year PhD student at the Information School, and member of the Health Informatics Research Group, has recently been featured in the   thirteenth edition of the White Rose Social Sciences DTC newsletter; “DTC Matters ”.The feature highlighted Wasim’s post on Twitter tools posted in July 2015, which received 13 thousand views and was ranked as the fourth most read all year.The post also highlighted the media attention surrounding a follow up post Amplified messages: How hashtag activism and Twitter diplomacy converged at #ThisIsACoup – and won which was cross posted on Democratic Audit UK , LSE European Politics and Policy , LSE British Politics & Policy , and is now indexed within Google News Search results.